1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the searching of electronic documents and more particularly to a system and method of processing search results in order to determine the relationships between the electronic documents in the search results.
2. Description of Related Art
A popular use of Internet-enabled computing devices (such as personal computers (PCs), personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellular telephones, etc.) is the performance of “web searches.” Typically, a user runs a web browser program on the computing device and uses the web browser to access a search engine at a remote server over the Internet. The user interface for the search engine is often a web page with text boxes in which the user may enter a keyword or series of keywords. Once these keywords are entered, the search engine prepares a list of web pages related to those keywords. Usually, the search engine does not actually search the Internet, but searches an index database, in which is maintained files corresponding to web pages on the Internet. In some cases, the index database consists of actual web pages, or compressed versions of web pages.
Once the list of relevant web pages has been generated, the user interface for the search engine presents the list to the user. FIG. 1 shows a typical web page user interface 100 for displaying search engine results. In FIG. 1, the results are presented as “links” 150, a form of hypertext that allows the user to jump directly to another web page when the user selects (“clicks” or “double-clicks”) the link with the cursor of the computing device. Links 150 are typically in order of decreasing relevance, with web page A 151 being the most relevant web page.
However, links that are the most strongly related to each other often appear at separate spots in the list of relevant documents. For example, web page A 151 and web page B 159 may in fact be from the same website. But, because they appear separately on the list, the user may be misled into thinking they are unrelated (except by the search keyword, of course). In addition, because they appear separately and there is a limited amount of display space on the computing device, other relevant web pages are crowded off of the display space and, thus, are not shown to the user. Furthermore, web pages that are strongly related to the same concept, such as web page H 157 and web page I 153, may be separated from each other, although it would be more effective and convenient for the user if web page H 157 and web page I 153 were shown grouped together.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method which displays search results so that items that are strongly related to each other are grouped together, both to avoid repetition and to provide more information to the viewer.